Toro Rosso 'doesn't care' if it beats Red Bull in 2015 F1 standings
Toro Rosso says its target is not to beat Red Bull in the constructors' championship but instead ensure a career-best fifth place in the end-of-season Formula 1 standings
Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz Jr's seventh and eighth places in front of Red Bull's Daniil Kvyat and Daniel Ricciardo in the Malaysian Grand Prix moved Toro Rosso past RBR into fifth in the 2015 teams' points.
It marked the first time since the second race of the 2009 season that Toro Rosso - which has never finished a season higher than sixth in the standings - had led Red Bull in the points.
But team boss Franz Tost said he was holding to his pre-season target of fifth in the standings rather than focusing on upstaging the senior team.
"Our target is not to finish ahead of Red Bull," Tost told AUTOSPORT. "Our target is to finish at the end of the season in fifth place in the constructors'.
"Whoever is behind us, I don't care.
"If you don't finish in the points then we cannot achieve our targets."
Toro Rosso's technical chief James Key said the team was now starting to prove to the outside world that its ambitious top-five goal was realistic.
"People had a bit of uncertainty when we said that, but we knew that we had made a decent step over the winter and we weren't taking anything for granted," he said.
"We felt that hopefully we'd done enough to put our car into a competitive enough condition to compete for something like P5.
"The guys around us that we've got to compete with are big teams with a lot of resources, so for us it's not easy, but you've got to have a go at it.
"The good thing is that everyone can believe now that what we've done is a reasonable effort. So psychologically it makes a big difference."
Despite Toro Rosso's relatively small size, Key believes it can hang on as larger teams develop after troubled starts.
"You know you have to look behind too - McLaren obviously have had few issues to recover and improve with their engine partner as the season goes," he admitted.
"The guys around us will all develop pretty well too.
"We haven't forgotten that, we started our European updates back in November and they're OK, so we've got a lot of stuff to come."
CONSTRUCTORS' STANDINGS SO FAR:
| Pos | Constructor | Points |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mercedes | 76 |
| 2 | Ferrari | 52 |
| 3 | Williams/Mercedes | 30 |
| 4 | Sauber/Ferrari | 14 |
| 5 | Toro Rosso/Renault | 12 |
| 6 | Red Bull/Renault | 11 |
| 7 | Force India/Mercedes | 7 |
| 8 | Lotus/Mercedes | 0 |
| 8 | McLaren/Honda | 0 |
| 10 | Marussia/Ferrari | 0 |
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